In the Kitchen at Mayfair Farm | Weekends with Yankee

“I used to say I was the only Jewish vegetarian pig farmer in my neighborhood,” Sarah Heffron tells me with a laugh. “But I think I hold that title in a wider area.” We’re standing in her kitchen, breading thinly sliced green tomatoes that I’ve just picked from the hoop house on her family’s property, Mayfair Farm, in Harrisville, New Hampshire. It’s late in the season, which means the tomatoes wouldn’t have ripened on the vine before the first frost, but a quick turn in a hot skillet will make them crisp and delicious. There’s a ham in the oven, also from the farm, and right outside the kitchen door, a small staff is preparing for a harvest feast in the barnlike event space that Sarah and her partner, Craig Thompson, built to diversify Mayfair’s offerings.

Today I’m helping Sarah get ready for the dinner, but we’re also filming an episode of Weekends with Yankee that highlights the beauty of this sylvan corner of southwestern New Hampshire. It’s a place of hilly pastures, lakes, and forests lined with old stone walls. Mayfair Farm sits just up the road from Harrisville Pond, and, like many successful family farms in New England, it’s an amalgam of businesses: an orchard, a vegetable garden, an Airbnb cottage, and a farm store that sells maple products, prepared meals, and baked goods (their almond cake won a 2017 Yankee Editors’ Choice Food Award). There are pigs in pens, and lambs up on the hill. And there’s this Instagram-ready event space, where Sarah and Craig host weddings and community farm dinners spring through fall. 

“My mom is a chef, so I grew up around her different food businesses,” Sarah says. “I tried to do different things. I rode horses for a long time; I got a master’s degree in school counseling. But my first love was really food, and I just kept coming back to it.”

Sarah made the following recipe as part of our harvest dinner. Inspired by Indian vegetable pakoras, these fritters are sweet and deeply savory, with just enough warming spices to make them an excellent appetizer as the weather turns cold. 

Get the Recipe: Mayfair Farm’s Sweet Potato Fritters